Hi everyone!
I'm Mitchell Heastie, Design Director on Total War: WARHAMMER III, and today I want to share with you some of the things I've been working on. This will be a developer diary that gives you a look into what is coming as part of Patch 5.2 and this time around I'll also talk a little bit wider than that about what to expect going forward for our updates and how you can help shape them.
First though a bit of backstory. When I think back to the very first DLC we ever made for the Total War: WARHAMMER trilogy, Call of the Beastmen, there was a moment where Rich and I discussed adding the moon cycle mechanic to the race. At the time this seemed like a tiny addition, and indeed it was compared to the kind of features we do now, but I always consider that moment monumental as for me it was the first instance of us pushing a boundary, trying to do something a little bit different that we hadn't done before, to add more than was originally planned, and we did it just because it was cool, we thought players would like it and we wanted the DLC to be as special as it could be.
I think it's that moment that set us on a path to try to do more for all new content, to keep pushing our own expectations for what new content for the game could be, to always be on the lookout for what special idea we could do next, and I really do believe it's that precedent that created a mindset for what got us here now with the absolutely insane scale of content we have. This way of working, to always be pushing, meant that over the years we tried a lot of new things, some that didn't work so well, others that were massive successes, but all the while our content was growing in scope and complexity, and we were learning.
This you will all know by now has had a few effects; I think our content got better over time, which is fantastic, but this improvement has meant that the content we created in the past grows more outdated as time progresses, either because it was made without the knowledge, lessons, or technology we now have. This is where your, and our, desire for the old content to be reworked or updated comes from - not failure, but progress and success. It's something we've been cognizant of for a long time, hence our many reworks and updates, and it's something we want to continue to do going forward.
I think it's a blessing to be able to have such a vivid view of how you as a designer, and as a team, have improved in your craft over the better part of a decade, but of course that does mean we have some work to do. Let's talk about that work.
—The Total War Team
